The Wonder(16)

Anna shook her head.

“Hadn’t you better take a sip?”

Overstepping her mark; the habits of a nurse died hard. Lib reminded herself that it was nothing to her whether the little fraud drank or not.

But Anna opened her mouth for the spoon and swallowed without difficulty. “O forgive me, that I may be refreshed,” she murmured.

Talking not to Lib, of course, but to God.

“Another?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Wright.”

Lib wrote down, 1:13 p.m., 1 tsp. water. Not that the quantity mattered, she supposed, except that she wanted to be able to give a full account of anything the child ingested on her watch.

Now there really was nothing left to do. Lib took the second chair. It was so close to Anna’s that their skirts were almost touching, but there was nowhere else to place it. She considered the long hours ahead with a sense of awkwardness. She’d spent months on end with other private patients, but this was different, because she was eyeing this child like a bird of prey, and Anna knew it.

A soft knock at the door made her leap up.

“Malachy O’Donnell, ma’am.” The farmer tapped his faded waistcoat where it buttoned.

“Mr. O’Donnell,” said Lib, putting her hand into his leathery one. She would have thanked him for his hospitality except that she was here as a sort of spy on his whole household, so it hardly seemed fitting.

He was short and wiry, as lean as his wife, but with a far narrower frame. Anna took after her father’s side. But no spare flesh on any of this family; a troupe of marionettes.

He bent down to kiss his daughter somewhere near the ear. “How are you, pet?”

“Very well, Dadda.” Beaming up at him.

Malachy O’Donnell stood there, nodding.

Disappointment weighed on Lib. She’d been expecting something more from the father. The grand showman behind the scenes—or at least a coconspirator, as prickly as his wife. But this yokel… “You keep, ah, shorthorns, Mr. O’Donnell?”

“Well. A few now,” he said. “I have the lease on a couple of water meadows for the grazing. I sell the, you know, for fertilizer.”

Lib realized he meant manure.

“Cattle, now, sometimes…” Malachy trailed off. “With their straying and breaking legs and getting stuck when they come out wrong, see—you might say they do be more trouble than they’re worth.”

What else had Lib seen outside the farmhouse? “You also have poultry, yes?”

“Ah, they’d be Rosaleen’s, now. Mrs. O’Donnell’s.” The man gave one last nod, as if something had been settled, and stroked his daughter’s hairline. He headed out, then doubled back. “Meant to say. That fellow from the paper’s here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He gestured towards the window. Through the smeary glass Lib saw an enclosed wagon. “To take Anna.”

“Take her where?” she snapped. Really, what did the committee men think they were doing, setting up the watch in this cramped and unhygienic cabin and then changing their minds and shipping the child off somewhere else?

“Take her face, just,” said her father. “Her likeness.”

REILLY & SONS, PHOTOGRAPHISTS, the van said on the side in pompous type. Lib could hear a stranger’s voice in the kitchen. Oh, this was too much. She took a few steps before remembering that she wasn’t allowed to leave the child’s side. She roped her arms around herself instead.

Rosaleen O’Donnell bustled in. “Mr. Reilly’s ready to do your daguerreotype, Anna.”

“Is this really necessary?” asked Lib.

“’Tis to be engraved and put in the paper.”

Printing a portrait of the young chancer, as if she were the queen. Or a two-headed calf, more like. “How far off is his studio?”

“Sure he does it right there in the van.” Mrs. O’Donnell jabbed her finger towards the window.

Lib let the child go outside in front of her but tugged her out of the way of an uncovered bucket, pungent with chemicals. Alcohol, she recognized, and… was it ether or chloroform? Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations.

As she handed Anna up the folding steps, Lib wrinkled her nose against a more complicated reek. Something like vinegar and nails.

“Scribbler been and gone, has he?” asked the lank-haired, disheveled man inside.

Lib narrowed her eyes.

“The journalist who’s writing the girl up.”

“I know nothing of any journalist, Mr. Reilly.”

His frock coat was blotched. “Stand by the pretty flowers, now, would you,” he said to Anna.

“Mightn’t she sit instead, if she’ll have to hold position for very long?” asked Lib. On the one occasion when she’d posed for a daguerreotype—in the ranks of Miss N.’s nurses—she’d found it a wearisome business. After the first few minutes one of the flightier young women had shifted and blurred the image, so they’d had to start all over again.

Reilly let out a chuckle and manoeuvred the camera a few inches on the wheeled foot of its tripod. “You’re looking at a master of the modern wet process. Three seconds, that’s all. The whole thing takes me no more than ten minutes from shutter to plate.”